fresh flowers: rambling thoughts

It's been quite a day today. This morning I decided I better go plant the last flowerbed. I had a few bedding plants left over from the containers that I couldn't put out because it started raining on me. So I worked up that bed, pulled out all the grass and planted them. I'm all done, I thought!

So I moved on to weeding around my cucumbers and mulching them, hoed around the potatoes and pulled out weeds along the stone stairs. Found the first strawberries of the season! What a lovely gift for today! Definitely time for lunch. While I'm making lunch I hear the sound of the small tractor right outside the window. The farmer/shepherd comes in and tells me that he has roto-tilled the other flowerbed (the one I was going to leave to the dogs) and that maybe I should fill it up with something. One more trip to the flower shop was in the near future.

Got that one planted and had a few plants left over so I weeded out another flowerbed I wasn't going to bother with and planted them in there. Still had some left so I threw a few flowers into the vegetable garden. I think I am really and truly done the planting now...I hope!

If you haven't noticed by now, I have a LOT of dirt in my yard to fill up. My MIL was an amazing gardener and filled up all these flower beds each and every year and tended them with loving care and the yard always looked superb. I am not so good as she! I've been slowly filling some of them up with perennials. I'm learning that if I want to transform my yard into something beautiful I'm going to have to work at it. Yes, I realize that this should not be a startling revelation, but to a citified inside type of girl it's a bit of a stunner. So this year I'm going to attempt to do the work of tending my yard...outside....

The little boys helped me plant the flowerbed and wanted to put little signs up so that everyone would know that these were 'their' flowers. Sasha got a little piece of cardboard and wrote "Sasha's Flowers" on it and pinned it to the ground with a straight pin! How cute is that? Lady-in-Waiting found a nest in the old barbeque with tiny red eggs in it, I have no idea what kind of bird they are from, but they are so perfect and like nothing I've ever seen before!

*the yellow dot is the pin

Then we hiked it into town for the Rookie baseball wind-up. Had fun playing ball with the kids, came home and finished up the rest of the planting, put some kids to bed, at least the ones that weren't scared of the thunder and lightning show. Then I got to pull out some crafty stuff and made up a sample of one of the crafts we're going to offer at the Ladies Time Out this summer. We're using recycled materials to make pretty things! I think it should be fun...